The Freedmen’s Teacher Project: Teachers among the Freed People in the U.S. South, 1861-1877

The Freedmen’s Teacher Project (FTP) was initiated more than four decades ago. Its focus was on the people who responded to the overwhelming demand of formerly enslaved southern African Americans for access to literacy. Its temporal scope is from the first weeks of the American Civil War to the end of Reconstruction. The intent was to amass as much information on as many of the teachers as possible in order to, first, answer a number of historical questions about the teachers and, second, to measure the black response to educational opportunity. The project employs prosopography, or collective biography, to reveal commonalities and exceptions among the teachers. Originally imagined as a study of perhaps five thousand teachers, it grew to embrace every identifiable teacher in black schools during the focus time period, numbering now just shy of twelve thousand individuals. The conclusions that have been drawn have surprised, and usually delighted, activists and scholars working in black education, the social history of teachers and teaching, women’s history, social history, and teacher education.